October 25, 2005

Not only is my son the sweetest and cutest kid in the world (when his horns are put away), but yesterday he had to give mommy and daddy a big group hug and kiss. After he did that he told us “best friends” – awww! What a great kid. He and I watched a little Monday night football last night. He seems to prefer watching football over baseball but he likes to play baseball.

We got a new kitty named Mimi. She’s a seven year old Maine Coon we got from Nickey’s sister. It turns out she needs to be an only kitty and her sister has two other cats, so her sister figured if she needed to give the cat away at least with us she could come visit her when she wanted to. Loki is infatuated with her and, of course, has already been graced by one of her claws on his snout. Maybe we’ll get a pot-bellied pig next….

October 10, 2005

We had a birthday party for Hayden at our house last weekend and it turned out pretty well. We rented a Spiderman bounce house and had it set up in the driveway. We had everything else set up in the garage – the tables, food, gifts, etc. We had Spiderman plates and cups, spiders hanging from the ceiling, and he got tons of Spiderman gifts. My mom and dad showed up, some of the neighbors, and a few other people. The bounce house was a big hit and I think the adults dominated it most of the time. There are at least 4 people in our neighborhood who have birthdays in November in the same week and we had so much fun in the bounce house that we’ve tenatively decided that we’re going to have a week long block party and have 4-5 bounce houses set up all week long.

On Hayden’s birthday we went out to dinner at Azteca. He got to wear a sombrero, they sang to him, and he got his picture taken. I think he was a little uncomfortable with the whole sombrero part but he got chocolate mouse afterwards which made up for it. He also got a call from his San Francisco grandma to wish him happy birthday.

To round out his week-long birthday we went to see my friends Robyn and James for lunch on Saturday. Hayden wanted to wear his Spiderman costume so we let him. He sure got a lot of smiles in the restaurant! After that we went to see his Aunt Tomi and her horses then we went to dinner at his Mukilteo grandmas house. It was the first time her side of the familly got to meet Nickey and Hayden. He really liked my cousin Kim and even said “She’s pretty” a few times. He is such a lady killer!

Hayden pretty much has potty training down, just a matter of a little more practice and I think we’ll be good. He’s really grown up a lot in the last few months.

Normally I don’t walk around town much, but due to a change in life recently I’ve been doing a lot more walking over the past two weeks. The city where I live now is not where I’ve spent most of my life. I grew up in a big city where people still say “Thank-you” when […]

To get me back in the swing of updating my blog again, I thought I’d throw out a question for anyone who has an opinion about it – is it more eco to ride public transportation or a motorcycle? I know that’s somewhat of a nebulous question since there are several types of motorcycles and […]

We’re moving from an apartment to a house next month, finally. The house will afford me the ability to start getting back into my eco-projects again, and I’ll be able to start posting updates and project details like I used to a few years ago. I’m really looking forward to it. I really want to […]

As promised *here*, here is the comparison between running a desktop and a raspberry pi. My raspberry pi setup is as such: 2x raspberry pi’s 2x external usb hard drives – one ssd, one sata 1x 8 port 3.0 usb hub Network hub is not measured in this test… Here are the results for the pi’s: […]

Back in February (only a few short months ago….) I stated I wanted to find out if it was possible to Replace your computer with a Raspberry Pi. I’ve been using my two raspberry pi’s since last February and replaced my former desktop, but never set about to measure the difference in power consumption – […]

I’ve had to move my blog a few times recently for various reasons. The last location was an AWS micro instance that just couldn’t keep up with running several blogs and a mysql server (yeah, well duh….). It limped along as valiantly as it could but I’ve finally found a new home for my blogs […]

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be working on replacing my full sized desktop computer, that used a 500w power supply, with a couple of credit card sized full function computers called Raspberry Pi. This little guy won’t be able to fully replace my desktop or laptop, but only because flash for web […]

“What!?!”, you may say. That sounds pretty non-eco, right? Lots of water being wasted…just down the drain. I’ve heard over and over again that shaving in the shower is bad for the environment. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s much more eco than you may think, if it’s done the right way. I’m […]

I’m sure I can’t be the only one that has a certain level of frustration with how the general mentality of the workforce is so lackadaisical toward environmentalism. Where I work, there are several recycle bins for cans and bins for paper – but what gets put in them? Trash. Grease stained boxes from lunch, […]

I’m glad to see there are more and more trends toward making computing datacenters as power efficient as possible. There are options now for lower power consumption servers, more datacenters are using solar and alternate cooling methods to further reduce their carbon footprint, and then there is Facebooks datacenter – which is described as the […]